California's mother lode country provides the backdrop for a series about a contemporary family of ranchers. Taking time out for music and dance like 1954 MGM musical, the opener tells how a spirited cafe waitress learns-after the fact-that she has married into a parentless but self-sufficient brood of six rowdy brothers. After her intial shock has passed, Hannah turns her attention to taming the rough and tumble McFadden brood. It's almost impossible, though,when the brothers discover that their prize bull has been killed. The furious young men suspect Wheeler, a nearby ranch owner who would stop at nothing to force the McFaddens into selling their land. Knowing that the brothers want revenge, Hannah comes up with a plan to win one of Wheeler's prize bulls for themselves.

Having pursuaded his brothers to borrow heavily to buy grain at a low price and store it in Freleng's Warehouse, Crane feels resposible for the family's financial distress after the grain is seized when Freleng files bankruptcy. Crane is arrested and jailed for instigating ranchers to raid the warehouse tp take their grain back when it is seized by the authorities. At his court hearing, ordered by the judge to identify his co-conspirators in the raid, Crane refuses, taking full responsibility and maintaining that, in this case, the law perversly harmed innocent citizens.

With Hannah pushing him, Ford struggles to overcome his shyness and ask pretty Cleo to a barn dance. Meanwhile, Evan's self-confidence is challenged when his hero, former rodeo champion Cooper Johnson, twice rejects him in rodeo-class tryouts. Later, Adam and Hannah fight over fight over the difference between encouraging and badgering: Hannah accuses Adam of pushing Evan to try one more time to get into Cooper's class and Adam says Hannah is forcing Ford into dating girls when he's not ready yet.

When Evan's horse, Diablo, suffers a broken leg, pretty Molly McGraw is the only veterinarian available to perform the surgery that's needed. She and Crane fall head over heels for each other, but Crane's stubborn McFadden pride resists Molly soon after she tells him that she has received the internship in equinw surgery that she has been seeking.- a commitment that means she will have to leave California and move back east.

Ford has been signed by a talent scout to be a back-up singer. Meanwhile, Guthrie, anxious to contribute something as the McFaddens try to scrape up the money for a new roof, hit upon panning for gold. When he chances on two armed men seeming to be prospecting downstream, he goes along with their idea that he team up with them, not knowing that they are in fact poachers, shooting bears out of season, and that they are wanted by the authorities.

Daniel considers himself luck when he is asked to fill in for High Sierra's injured guitar player. But soon after he and Tally Dean fall in love, he learns that Tally is determined to make her mark in big-time music, no matter what. Then he feels betrayed when he Brian tells him that he and Tally once had a short-lived but intense romance.

Just before a big game, Adam, As the eldest, removes Brian from the family's mountain polo team because of Brian's reckless showing-off on horseback. An angry Brian goes on a bender and ends up in jail. The arguement between Adam and Brian causes a rift among some of the brothers as well, who regard Brian as the best athlete in the family and crucial to the team. It especially disturbs young Guthrie, who idolizes both of his brothers.

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Daniel befriends Stormy Weather, an alcoholic former country music star whom he idolizes. He tries to help him get back on his feet and resume his career, but Stormy's presence creates a bitter conflict within the family. Several of the brothers think that he is wasting his time on Stormy, whom they consider a loser, and that Stormy's drinking is a bad influence on Guthrie.

The McFaddens are up in arms after Guthrie is poisoned by polluted water in a stream on their property, but when long-time shriff of Carbon County, Buck Tanner, stalls and delays the promised investigations, Adam concludes that he must be protecting someone, and decides to run for office himself. As he begins his campaign, however, Adam finds that certain parties in the county will stop at nothing to destroy his candidacy.

Soon after Sophie Barton, a beautiful young divorcee and single parnet from San Fransisco, moves into the run-down ranch that she has inherited down the road from the McFadden spread, she and Hannh become friends. But sparks fly when Sophie tells Adam that he can no longer graze McFadden cattle on her land, breaking an agreement going back 30 years between her grandfather and Adam's father, and soon she is placed in peril by a stampede and barn-burning.

After meeting the warm, closeknit McFadden family, Ben Shepherd, a guarded man who keeps his past and personal life a mystery, finds it hard to believe that Brian would want to give it all up for alife of wandering the west, alone. But Brian, restless and anxious to split from the ranch falls in with a brawling loner, who seems to,lead the kind of life that Brian is looking for. Meanwhile, Evan loses concentration in football practice because he is too busy with the cheerleaders. He is ordered by the coach to spend a week in the girls' dance class--some ""punishment"".

At Christmas time, Meg Palmer, recently widowed and working job to job to support her kids, mistakes Crane's and Daniel's intentions when they try to help whenher car breaks down., and lashes out at them. She soon accepts the McFadden family's generosity as genuine, but faces the struggle of her life as her deceased husband's parents sue for custody of her three children.

Hannah""s impassioned protest and armed stand against the bulldozer demolition of the oldest building in Murphy, the original schoolhouse where her great-grandmother once taught, falls on deaf ears, even among the McFadden men. A factory is to be built in its place and jobs mean more to many of the families than presrving a bit of local history, even though the construction company gained the title by unscrupulous means. Meanwhile, Guthrie runs into a mini-scandal when hi frog, ""Loser"", is stolen just before the First Annual Carbon Coounty Frog-Jumping Derby. (Calaveras County, where this series is filmed, was the sire of Mark Twain's famous jumping-frog tale).

Evan and Hannah find Angelina, a young, prgnant illegal alien hiding in their barn. She is ravenous and frightened from days of running after witnessing her husband's murder, and her baby is due at any time. The McFaddens give her shelter, but Angelina runs away again, not knowing that in return for her help inthe case against the farm-labor smugglers, the authorities can offer her protection and citizenship.

Brian teaches Guthrie how to hunt and also to respect all wild life, but Guthrie is not sure he could shoot to kill. Several days later, Adam risks being mauled when he and his brothers track and corner ""Old Scarback"", a wounded mountain lion suspected of killing local livestock. When Adam is knocked unconscious in a fall, Guthrie is forced to make a life-or-death decision when he sees the lion afeter Adam.

Angry marijuana growers open fire on the McFaddens as the brothers begin searching the hills with the police, who are looking to bust a large-scale pot-growing operation in Carbon County. While his older brothers are risking their lives trying to find the hidden marijuana fields before they can be harvested, Guthrie confronts a couple of older boys at his junior high who are forcing younger kids to buy ""weed"" from them.

During a blizzard, the sheriff asks Hannah and four others trained in first-aid to fly to an isolated mountain community where botulism has broken out. When the plane goes down and raio contact is lost, Adam sets out to backpack into the mountains to find themm against the advice of the National Guard. Meanwhile, Hannah calls on her inner strength to help,keep the survivors, including the gravely wounded pilot, alive and hopeful of rescue.

Adam has never had the proper car to win the Gold Rush Race, but this year has found one. When Hannah tells the family that she is three months pregnant, Adam decides to drop out, not wanting to risk his life racing on the hazardous back-country dirt roads. But Hannah, who knows how much ther ace means to Adam, insists that he go through with it. Adam burns up the road racing against a professional racer, unaware that Hannah has had complications and has been rushed to the hospital.

Adam, a star of the 1972 Murphys High School basketball team, expects to have a good time reliving that championship season at his classes tenth reunion. But six head of cattle stolen from the McFadden ranch, follwed by a murder, draw Adam away from the reunion. As he, Brian and Crane arm themselves to lead the search for the rustlers, Adam can't help but wonder at the coincidence that his old friend, Mike, after years away, returns to start up a cattle ranch.

Daniel's idea is to carry on the family tradition and find enough small gold nuggets to fahion a ring for Hannah. In spite of the warnings from the owner of The Howling Man Gold Mine, Daniel and his younger brothers go into the mine to find the nuggets. When the mine collapses, Daniel is able to free himself and bears all the blame from the mine owner whose daughter is trapped with Evan, Ford, and Guthrie, and rescuers fear a total collapse at any time.

As the McFaddens prepare for a cattle roundup in the high country, where packs of rabid coyotes have been attacking the herd, Adam decides that Hannah's proper place is at the ranch with Guthrie, and that Daniel, who wants to stay behind to rehearse for a big audition, has to go. When Hannah shows up anyway, Adam's irritation and Daniel's simmering frustrationboil over into a family feud, leading Adam to send Hannah back to the ranch. Later, Hannah, Unarmed must defend Evan, who has been knocked unconscious in a fall, from a rabid coyote.